Medicine Sans Frontiers ( MSF) Doctors Without Borders have been operating in Ukraine since the war began.
A big problem was that the hospitals in the East were overwhelmed and patients had to be transferred over 1000 kilometres to hospitals in west Ukraine for treatment. In conjunction with Ukrainian Railways a team from MSF very quickly converted eight 1980 era railway carriages into a cross between an ambulance and a state of the art intensive care unit . Staffed by MSF volunteers from all over the world the normal journey time is 36 hours and by the end of July over 40 journeys had conveyed 1152 patients to hospitals in west Ukraine.
Read more about it on MSF.ORG.UK/TRAIN
Frank Paterson
Please use the box at the bottom of the page to provide a comment. Your e-mail will not be published and your comments will just be linked to this item and not used elsewhere.
[Q01B]
For a complete history of ambulance trains through the years, the book 'Trains of Hope' is available on the FNRM website: www.nrmfriends.org.uk/product-page/trains-of-hope